Ringside at Galloway vs Hitchens

George Galloway describes Christopher Hitchens as a "drink-sodden former Trotskyite popinjay". Christopher Hitchens describes George Galloway as a "Ba'athist, short-arse, sub-Leninist, East End carpetbagger". Rather than look for two ferrets and a sack, I accepted an invitation to watch Chris & George slug it out in New York over Iraq. It turned out to be bravura political vaudeville, a sort of Carry On up the Ante.

Galloway practised the favoured politician's trick of praising his prey before sinking his teeth into him. Hitchens looked like the terrified jungle explorer trapped by the hungry tiger. The explorer proclaims his amazement and relief when the tiger lowers his head in peaceful prayer. "I'm not praying," says the tiger. "I'm saying Grace." But before George could polish off his victim, he performed political hara-kari: he told a New York audience that they brought 9/11 upon themselves.

My favourite moment all evening was when Galloway accused Hitchens of "cheap demagoguery". Pots and black kettles wouldn't begin to cover it. Galloway also claimed to have denounced Saddam Hussein "in the most withering terms". I know about Galloway's withering attacks, and in my ample experience they don't usually include salutations of courage and indefatigability. Still, fresh from his senate triumph, and dressed in his natty beige suit, Galloway always looked the winner. You'll rarely meet a more skilled politician. And whatever you say about skilled (British) politicians, when the gloves come off for a Punch-and-Judy knockabout, they'll annihilate a writer any day. I was vaguely surprised that Hitchens even landed some punches.

Opposing the war is one thing. But it would be quite a different, heinous thing, argued Hitchens, to pull troops out now and abandon Iraqi democrats and trade unionists fighting for their lives against an unholy murderous alliance of Ba'athists and Bin Ladenists. But then Galloway is no stranger to unholy alliances. His Respect coalition, as Hitchens pointed out, spans "the venomous SWP at one end, to your one-God fanatics at the other".

By choosing to defend not only the Bush administration's handling of disaster management in Iraq, but in Louisiana too, Hitchens lost the plot completely. Galloway got well-deserved applause when he slated Hitchens for being "a mouthpiece for those miserable, malevolent incompetents who couldn't even pick up the bodies of their own citizens in New Orleans". The cheers he got upon mention of his book, Mr Galloway Goes to Washington, were also well deserved. (He might even consider a new jaw-dropper - Mr Galloway Goes to Bethnal Green.) But Galloway should recognise his error in arguing that every sovereign government must be free "to make its own mistakes". No. Not when those mistakes include genocide. Absolutely not.

Even so, Galloway spoke gospel when he told Hitchens "sometimes in life you have to choose between evil and more evil". That's exactly what people like Hitchens and myself have been arguing for years. Sometimes you are forced to choose between evil and more evil. In my view it is a self-evident truth that George Bush is evil. And that Saddam Hussein is more evil. That's the bottom line. I envy all those people who never had to choose. And I despair of someone such as Galloway who insists (unlike many in the anti-war movement) that the evil perpetrated in America's torture chambers - for example, the disgusting practice of chaining prisoners in dog collars and sexually humiliating them - is equivalent to the evil perpetrated in Saddam's torture chambers where people were literally nailed to walls and crucified. Or that the evil of keeping one race in poverty (as America does with African-Americans) is as evil as exterminating members of a race (as Iraq did with the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs).

As Hitchens rightly said of Iraq under Saddam: "It was a concentration camp above ground, and a cemetery beneath." It's a question of degree. Galloway gets too carried away with his own indisputable talents to recognise that. Speaking of his own performance at the Senate, he said: "God gave me wings that day." He may yet find they're made of wax.